Free Lunch

Apparently lunch is supposed to be free. Or rather a person who has never run anything short of his own campaign feels free to tell the lunch lady that lunch should be free. Because…..well, I’m not real sure.

Because if it’s not free, it’s just “not good business”

President Obama slammed Bank of America’s $5 debit card card fee in an interview with ABCnews.com and Yahoo on Monday, calling the charge “not good business practice.”
“You don’t have some inherent right just to, you know, get a certain amount of profit, if your customers are being mistreated,” he said. Later, he added, “this is exactly the sort of stuff that folks are frustrated by.”

Here in America….you actually DO have a right to try to maintain a certain amount of profit. How does our president not KNOW that.
And can someone explain to me why the press thinks we are so ignorant that we can’t figure out that either changing banks or using cash/checks would solve the problem of the $5/month usage fee on a debit card?

And do we need ANOTHER bill from the federal government to make it easier to close our account with a private business? Let alone do the currently nonfee charging banks need encouragement to point out their lower fees?

Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) introduced a bill that would make it easier for customers to close their accounts and prohibit banks from assessing fees for the process. Meanwhile, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) sent a letter to community banks and credit unions in his home state urging them to “seize this competitive opportunity” to woo consumers away from larger institutions.

Actually – never mind all that. I don’t even know why I bothered to read it. I should just be writing educational letters to the president.

Dear President Obama,
When you charge a business X in a capitalist sort of model, that X is going to have to be made up for somewhere else. Try to guess where before you start the charge so that you can either anticipate the change or skip the X altogether because the net result will be 0 charge to the business and X charge to others.

Just saying.
Terri

The Protests

I hope I don’t need to write about how these are so NOT similar to the Tea Party movement.

Instead I direct you to the final sentence in a Washington Post story.

Nearby, someone had set up a board for people to write suggestions for what the movement’s goal should be.

They included calls to “demand jobs for all,” to “talk about imperialism,” to “talk about campaign finance reform” and to “give out chalk to everyone to write slogans on all walls as we march.”

So basically the protesters want to “talk” or they want “free goods” or they want you to provide them with a job. [side note: The title of the article is "Wall Street protesters hope to plant seeds of a national cause". FREE CHALK!]

Contrast that with a Reagan QOTD from JK.

You grew up in a different world,” the student said. “Today we have television, jet planes, space travel, nuclear energy, computers. …” Taking advantage of a pause in the student’s litany, Reagan said, “You’re right. We didn’t have those things when we were young. We invented them.”

Luckily this country is still made of people like that and the Tea Party attests to that. Those Wall Street Protesters are not the norm and Victor Davis Hanson reminds us of what this country will do very soon. He walks through a lot of reasons, but this rings very true.

When Obama leaves office, there will be a sense of psychological release in the business community that will lead to a far greater stimulus than printing more money.

It’s your own dang fault, whiner

There was a day when ‘Mercans were tough, strong, independent and willing to take risks to start businesses and hire people. Now we’re just scared whiney babies.

Americans see themselves as go-getters and risk-takers. Our optimism will ultimately rescue us. So it’s said. But the folklore increasingly collides with reality. The 2008-09 financial crisis traumatized millions. It swelled the ranks of risk-avoiders, worrywarts and victims. Of course, this was mainly a reaction to overborrowing, inflated home values and lost jobs. But now the fear factor is feeding on itself — and it’s smothering the recovery.

OR…….and I write this as someone who has fantasized about starting my own business my whole life, but who is definitely risk averse and has definitely quit this little fantasy for the time being…….
perhaps it’s that until 2014 no one, not one person knows how Obamacare is going to affect their business, their life, their income or their health. And until at the soonest 2013 no one has a clue what their taxes will be or how serious this country is going to take the debt crisis.

Between calling the “Bush tax cuts” the “Bush tax cuts” and not ….”current tax rates” and asking for more taxes on “the rich” without excluding small businesses, (let alone Obamacare) no one can plan farther along than the next month let alone come up with a new business with a 2-5 year plan of action.

Cripes, even der Spiegel is noticing what course this country is taking and recommending and calling is asinine.

The fact that Europeans are unwilling to comply with Obama’s strange logic gives reason for hope. It makes no sense to pile up more and more debt on already unstable piles of debt. The world doesn’t have too little debt, but too much.

Obama should retract his advice, or he might end up like the village judge in Kleist’s comedy.

Go ahead – make a plan, be brave. Hire new people, create new goods, don’t look behind the current. No one has a clue what’s behind it. We just all know it will open soon.

It’s Autumn!

This is the road up to some property I have in Northern Colorado. (this is from the Colorado side – the last snowy photo was from the Wyoming side)